Interior
20 essential skills for successful web designers
Kadin Dias
March 25, 2021
4 min read
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20 web designer skills to have
Here's a medley of 20 skills to help you become a design expert, no matter where you're at in your career.
Being a web designer involves harmoniously combining visuals and content. But non-technical skills, like collaboration and communication, are also important.
1. Know the principles of design
You don’t need to know music theory to write a song, and if you’ve never taken an art class, you can still draw. Some of us might have an innate artistic ability, but knowing the basic
fundamentals can make the difference between recreating what you see and being able to build a design that’s calculated and unique.
“ Essential visual design principles” does a deeper dive into the principles of visual design rooted in Gestalt psychology. These fundamentals are the foundation of web and graphic design and important to know. Whether you’re designing a portfolio or a print ad, these concepts can help guide your work. Let’s do a quick recap.
Emergence
Rather than focusing on individual parts, we tend to process visual stimuli as a whole.
Emergence is seeing an arrangement of visuals and immediately understanding what they represent. When something breaks a pattern, we become aware of the pieces that make it up.
Reification
Reification is using only the essential parts of an object to make it identifiable. It lets you exercise restraint in a design, while still conveying meaning.
Invariance
Invariance is being able to use tasteful discordance in your designs, making something stand
out from a group of similar objects. The use of invariance allows you to highlight parts of a
design.
2. Typography